Inter get their comeuppance and Spurs top the group

Harry Redknapp likened Gareth Bale's latest wonder show to a boxer taking on a champion - and coming out on top.

The Welsh flyer tormented Maicon, widely regarded as the best right-back in the world, from the first minute to the last as we secured a famous 3-1 win against Inter Milan in the Champions League at White Hart Lane on Tuesday night.

Once again, the reigning Italian and European champions simply couldn't stop Gareth's raids down the left flank.

His performance was so good that you could even argue it was better that his hat-trick at the San Siro on October 20.

Gareth first burst past the Brazilian international in the 12th minute and 78 minutes later he was still charging, this time past Lucio, another of Inter's great defenders, to secure victory.

Billed as a key battle before the game, it was simply no contest as Gareth blasted past Maicon - voted best defender in the Champions League last season - time and time again.

Rafa van der Vaart opened the scoring in the first half from Luka Modric's excellent assist and Gareth's run and cross set-up Peter Crouch for 2-0 on the hour.

Samuel Eto'o gave Inter hope with a fine reply with 10 minutes left but the best was yet to come from Gareth.

Younes Kaboul broke up play on the edge of our box and fed Gareth, midway in our half.

He charged forward, pushed the ball past Lucio and raced onto it before squaring for Roman Pavlyuchenko to tap home the clincher.

It was one of the great, glory, glory nights at the Lane and the win left us sitting proudly at the top of Group A.

"Gareth was outstanding and you have to take into account who he was playing against," stated Harry afterwards.

"He was up against a right-back who before these two games, no-one could give him a chasing.

"I've watched him play over the years and he's rated by many, many people as the best right-back in the world.

"So Gareth has done it against the best.

"It's like a boxer. You might be knocking everyone out but suddenly you come up against a champion and it's whether or not you can do it against the top people.

"Gareth's done it again and in both games, no disrespect to the right-back, he's given him the most torrid time you could wish to see.

"It was just amazing to see him do that to such a top player."

Bank Holiday Weekend

A long weekend is always great, so I was looking forward to the extra day today.  I must say I spent most of the weekend doing boring domestic chores, but took a break now and again to go on Facebook mainly to play Mafia Wars.  I know most people can’t understand a seemingly intelligent person playing these virtual games, everyone to their own I say and it works for me.  I’ve got around 1,800 friends on FB  of these about 200 or so would be relatives or real friends, the rest I picked up playing Mafia Wars.   There are a lot of clans and they fight each other, mainly friendly wars, sometimes not.  I started an Irish Clan (TIM the Irish Mob) about 1½ years ago and now have around 2,000 members, I am the Godmother obviously being the creator. I have made quite a few mates through this, they’re from all around the world and all have some Irish connection.  Now I must add I do get the odd weirdo but I’m quick to remove them.  I would never accept a friend request unless (a) I knew them or (b) we had lots of mutual friends in common.  Anyway I find it a great way to chill out especially after a difficult, stressful day at work.

I took another break today from my domesticity and decided to take 2 laptops apart (now I do enjoy that)  Both machines are broken so before I sent them to the dump I removed hard drives, one was useful enough but the other only 40gb.  I also removed the memory and now have 3 spare 1gb DDR2’s.  I’m sure someone will be glad of them for their laptop.  I stripped another few things that may come in useful some day and if not, well they won’t take up much space.

I’m going to treat myself to a new laptop for Christmas, a decent one!  I’m now left with only the notebook and useless ipad, though in saying that I downloaded Nav Free on it and it’ll make a fine Sat Nav for the car, nice big display.  Well I do have the 2 PC's but I like to always have a laptop on my lap when watching TV or in bed and if there was a waterproof one I’d use it in the bathroom as well.

Champions League

It was such an exciting prospect having Spurs in the Champion's League this season.  I have supported them since I was a very young child and went to all the games when I was living in London.  Of course the glory days of the early 60's haven't been replicated at the Lane since, although we've won a few F.A., League and UEFA cups, the European Cup has never been in the trophy cabinet.

To see the Spurs players walk out on the pitch to the sound of Handel's 'Zadok the Priest' (better known to most as Champions League intro music) does make me shiver with excitement.

Anyway so far we've done ok, first match I was on holidays in Spain and we watched it in a bar, Spurs were away to Werder Bremmen and were winning 2-0 but Werder Bremen came back to equalise. The next game was at home to FC Twente, a brilliant game and we came out worthy winners 4-1.

Tonight though we play the present champions Inter Milan away.  I hope we can manage a draw, a win would be brilliant...but!  I do feel that last year one of the reasons Inter won the trophy was having Jose Mourinho as coach, he's not called the special one for nothing.  We now travel to the San Siro on level points with Inter and all to play for. As Inter Milan's Lucio says

"Tottenham are rookies in the Champions League but they possess an excellent squad with many internationals and with enormous quality in front of goal"

Please, please please.

Wow that was some match, the first 45 minutes everything that could go wrong, did go wrong as Inter took a 4-0 lead and we went down to 10 men.

We were 1-0 down inside two minutes but it quickly went from bad to worse against the Champions League holders.

Heurelho Gomes was sent off for bringing down Jonathan Biabiany in the box and Samuel Eto'o doubled Inter's lead from the penalty spot.

We also lost the attacking guile of Luka Modric, who had to be sacrificed to allow Carlo Cudicini to take over in goal.

A native of Milan and former AC keeper, Carlo could do little as Dejan Stankovic struck the third from 20 yards five minutes later and Eto'o made it 4-0 at half-time.

The 10 men certainly looked fired up at the start of the second half and Bale opened his account in stunning style, a 70-yard dash past Maicon and Javier Zanetti before firing low across Julio Cesar into the far corner  Watch incredible Bale goals

That looked to be our consolation as the game entered the final few minutes but Bale struck again, a carbon-copy of his first, beating Zanetti and lashing into the same corner for 4-2 in th 90th minute.

Incredibly, the Welsh star completed his hat-trick a minute later as he made it a treble of drives into that bottom corner, this time from Aaron Lennon's assist.

The only shame was that there was no time left in added time to mount another serious attack.

It actually felt like we won the game in the end.  Never mind they have to visit the Lane in 2 weeks so hopefully we'll get revenge.  Great result as well between Werder and FC Twente (a Draw) means we are still holding on to second place.

Grandma

I now have 4 Grandchildren.  A very happy birthday to my eldest Grandson Louis who is 6 today.  Alexa, his sister is 2 (more about her later).  They live in Surrey, England.  Then there is Jack 3 and Luke 3 months, who are both in Clonmel.

To say I’m not your stereotype Grandma would be putting it mildly!  No rocking chairs, knitting and baking for this one.  I think I disappoint my children somewhat, but I have a very busy life, so much going on, that I don’t really have time to do those Grandmotherly things like babysitting and gaga-ing all the time.

On the upside though, once they get past that baby, dependant stage and they can speak and act fairly normally without crying all the time I come into my own!  Jack was up here yesterday afternoon so I let him play Millionaire on my ipad…see pic below.  Now in all fairness not many grannies do that.

 

Now Alexa (or Lexi as we call her) who is 2, is certainly something else.  She actually proves my point that women are the superior race.  She was over on holidays a few weeks ago and always runs to me and jumps on my lap saying “computer, computer Gran” I then log onto Youtube to find things to amuse her and this particular day it was going on for too long and I had other things to be getting on with, so I showed her how to use the mouse and click on things and how to go back and look for other things of interest.  Lo and behold she got it straight away and for the rest of the holiday you’d find Lexi sitting up next to the PC finding her way around Youtube and playing her favourites.  But better still the boys would ask her to find the things that they wanted to watch.  Maybe it’s laziness on the male part, but I really don’t think so.

My intention was to get another picture of Jack but he decided he wouldn't cooperate.  So instead I took a photo of our Golden Labrador Lucy.  She didn't complain, dogs are so obedient, not like children!

Hi Marie Grace here

I have a passion for new gadgets and as soon they're launched I have to buy them.  My latest was the ipad which in my opinion, is very overrated!  I brought it to Spain with me recently and I was very disappointed as I couldn't play my favourite game (Mafia Wars) on Facebook.  The reason for this being that Apple does not support flash player on their products. 

Back to the ipad though, it has a couple of good points, first being that the battery DOES last ten hours, the Apps are pretty good and if they are not free then they are fairly cheap to buy.  It's also very light to carry around.  On the negative side, obviously the flash player is an issue, can't upload your photos unless you purchase an expensive Apple connector, the pop up keyboard is quite annoying and often pops up when you don't need it, wifi connection fairly iffy and the case which is a necessity is also very expensive. But of course me being me, went on ebay and got a similar one for £4.99.  The other thing that irritated me was that I am always downloading music from a free programme which I transfer to my MP3. Needless to say Apple don't allow this and one has to pay 79c per track via itunes.  But again me being me found a way around this.  In the application I use to download music (which shall remain nameless) in the settings option, I found a handy little box to tick...copy all music to itunes...Low and behold my ipad now contains hundreds and hundreds of my favourite tracks and albums.  Anyway enough about ipads they are cheap enough to purchase so I don't feel too hard done by. 

Apple Ireland

Just a bit of background info.  I was born in London (Irish parents) and have one brother. I did fairly well in school but in those days (showing my age now) the word College or University wasn't in my parent's vocabulary.  When I left school I got a job in Lloyd's Bank in the City.  To say it was boring would be an understatement so I went job hunting again.  Got a job in a merchant bank nearby and actually stayed there for a few years.

I met an Irishman, got married and moved to this country where I always dreamed of living as a child.

My whole point in writing this was just really to say that it wasn't until I was 47 years old did I meet my first computer, this was due to the fact that I was out of the workforce for many years raising my family.

I had got a job in accounts at our local radio station and on the first day when I was shown to my office, there it was sitting on the desk.  "what's that?" I asked.

To me that was the start of my life as I know it now.  I purchased a PC a couple of weeks later and my first  memory was sending and receiving that initial email., this to me marked an historic moment in the evolution of communication and these were the slow dial up days of course.  The email was to my brother in London, and I waited expectantly for his return email and wow!  This was pure magic to me.

The rest is history, I couldn't get enough, from someone who started in the radio station completely computer illiterate to 6 months later when all and sundry would be asking me for advice and help.

Almost 3 years later quite a few of us were made redundant, I decided to invest some money into my own business venture, so at the age of nearly 50, MG Print was born.  It started as mainly T-Shirts, Hats, Mugs and Bag printing, I would make all the designs, logo's etc myself and became quite au fait with Photoshop, self taught of course.  Later I moved on to include business cards, letterheads, comp slips etc.  It was succesful enough and I always had my regular customers coming back.  I also had a website which my brother designed, this would get me orders from further afield, which was great as I always found Clonmel people very cliquey and begrudging, they hate to see local people doing well.

Up to this time all my computer knowledge was self taught and I felt the time had come to get a bit of training.  My first port of call was ECDL which I did through a local computer training centre in Clonmel, I think I completed the exam for every module in under ten minutes and got 100% on each.  On to the advanced then, these proved to be slightly more of a challenge.  I then headed down to WIT to do the PC Maintenance and Networking course,  I loved that!  To this day I have found this the most useful, although I can get a bit irritated at work, especially when I'm busy and every Tom, Dick and Harry wants me to solve their PC problems for free of course.  The other day a lady in an office nearby was in a panic, she couldn't log on as the keyboard wasn't working.  Turns out keyboard wasn't connected to the systems unit.  Look for the simple solutions first, you'd be suprised at how many people haven't their printer turned on or removed the sticker from the ink cartridge, their monitor plugged in, the list goes on............

My next piece of training was CTP which was very enjoyable and I am now a qualified tutor (do a good bit of that free at work as well)  Don't think I'd like to be a tutor though because I 've no patience and don't suffer fools gladly and I'd probably keep telling people they were bloody thick!  I tried teaching my better half a few years ago, it reminds me of when he was teaching me to drive...IT JUST DOESN'T WORK!  Anyway when we started speaking again I told him to go and get outside training to teach him the basics.  Why is it that people who are just starting out with computer training blame the computer for everything?  It's never their own fault!

Anyway these days I have a safe proper job (well as safe as any job in Ireland is) I enjoy it very much and a regular salary is good.  The printing business is still there although I actually don't do much of that now.  I still do the odd job for a friend or if it's to help a charity, as I can't bear to see them being ripped off by outrageous prices, so I would do it for cost price.